If you asked me to name the topic I’d class as my core academic specialisation, you’d probably guess artificial intelligence, and you’d be wrong, or at least premature, that one came later. The real answer is openness: open access, open source, open content, the Commons, non-proprietary licensing. This was the Read more
Something curious has been occurring in the world of digital rights. Openness, once one of the cornerstones of Internet culture, has lost its shine. There used to be a time in which everything was open. We had open source, open access, open science, open content, open hardware, open source water, Read more
One of my favourite anime series of all time is the first season of Sword Art Online. It’s a story about your typical massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), an earlier Metaverse to all of you young ones, this is an immersive VR space where users log in using a Read more
The free and open source developing world is abuzz with a new feature from GitHub called Copilot. This is a programming tool that has been trained using code from GitHub’s own corpus. For those familiar, GitHub is the world’s largest open source software repository, it has 40 million users and Read more
*Thanks to Simon Phipps for coining “fake GNUs“, which I’m totally stealing. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community has been shaken by a minor yet interesting incident that has opened a discussion on politics and governance. Lerna is a popular open source tool for managing JavaScript projects, and Read more
Amongst one of the most archaic legal arguments one can engage in, the question of whether free software licences are contracts or mere licences is up there with similar arcane questions about monkeys having rights. Thankfully I seem to be a specialist in those exact types of questions. A few Read more
When Microsoft stated last year that they loved open source, the first thought that crossed my mind was that Free and Open Source Software had won the war, and that the rest would simply be a race to determine who would be left to carry the torch into the proprietary Read more
I was not going to mention the sad early departure of Steve Jobs, the media and the blogosphere are already saturated with coverage of his death. Of all the words uttered in the last few days, I think that xkcd’s tribute (pictured) is the most adequate. The coverage has been Read more
Google has just lost a patent infringement suit in Texas (where else?) which could have nefarious consequences for open source development in the United States. A Texas jury has awarded Bedrock Computer Technologies $5 million USD when it found that the search engine giant had infringed one of its software Read more
I’ve been looking with great interest OpenKinect, an open source project that in its own words is an “open community of people interested in making use of the amazing Xbox Kinect hardware with our PCs and other devices. We are working on free, open source libraries that will enable the Read more